A&B Rail Road seeks extension toward Toledo

ADRIAN — A local railroad company and economic development officials again are applying for federal funding to extend a rail line into Ohio.

The Adrian & Blissfield Rail Road and Lenawee Now are applying for $6,262,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program to fund part of the projected $10,750,000 cost of laying eight miles of track from Riga to Ottawa Lake to connect to an existing Norfolk Southern Railway line. That line goes into Sylvania.

A&B would pay $3,580,000, and the Michigan Department of Transportation has pledged $908,000 toward the project, according to a summary of the application provided to the Lenawee County Board of Commissioners’ personnel/ways and means committee for its meeting Tuesday.

The committee voted 9-0 to allow county administrator Martin Marshall to sign the grant application. The county officially is the applicant, but is otherwise not involved in the project. Marshall said no county funds would be used for the project.

“The whole emphasis of this grant is to get our products to the port of Toledo or the railyards in Toledo without a three-day trip,” Randy Yagiela, Lenawee Now development staff member, told the committee.

Products presently being shipped by train from Lenawee County to Toledo have to go to Fort Wayne and then Elkhart in Indiana before getting to Toledo, which takes three days. Connecting to the Norfolk Southern line in Ottawa Lake would shorten the trip to one day.

Other benefits of the project would be fewer traffic tie-ups from trains crossing streets in Adrian, fewer hazardous materials passing through the city and fewer big trucks on local roads transporting materials to Toledo, Yagiela said.

The grant application summary estimated building the new line would save about $47 million in travel time in Adrian. It would be offset by about $1.9 million in traffic delays caused by crossing nine county roads between Riga and Ottawa Lake.

The line would follow an existing railbed between Tagsold Highway and Ottawa Lake Road, the summary said. Yagiela said some of the project costs are for property acquisition, but most is for buying rails and other materials to rebuild the railroad that once was along that route.

Commissioner K.Z. Bolton, D-Adrian, asked if the project could involve passenger trains. Yagiela said including passenger travel would require Lenawee Now to study the economic impact of tourism, which it is not prepared to do. He said they need to get the rails built first before exploring passenger travel on them.

The first time the county, railroad and Lenawee Now applied for the same grant they were up against the light-rail project in Detroit that is now the QLine along Woodward Avenue. Yagiela said with all of the corporate and governmental backing that project had, “we didn’t have a chance.”

Yagiela said this time around A&B and Lenawee Now commissioned a study to provide a cost-benefit analysis for the grant application, using funds from another grant program to help pay for it. He said the TIGER program is highly competitive, with both rural and urban projects competing for the same funding, and the analysis should make it more competitive.

“I was told it’s easier to get into Harvard than to get this grant,” he said.

The study looked at a reduction in road crashes, reduction in travel time, reduction in pollutant emissions and fuel consumption, and business expansion due to the new rail route.

“The evidence has shown that this project would save $500 million to almost $1 billion (in) 2017 (dollars) in aggregate social monetized utility over 25 years using various discounting methods recommended by the TIGER Grant in these categories,” the summary said.

Yagiela said the project has the support of legislators and local municipalities.

If the grant is approved, the project could be completed by September 2023, Yagiela said.